Two Christmas Sermons

This is our house's Christmas cactus. It was struggling mightily on our kitchen counter, so I adopted it and have been showing it all the affection I can, which is sparse and sporadic, but apparently sufficient. It's been quite the year, and both the cactus and I are glad we've gotten through Christmas. Below are the links to two sermons I preached on Sunday, which I hope will be good reason this season. The first is about Mary and is good for those who want to be future revolutionaries, and the second is about the struggles some of us go through during the Christmas season and is good for those who need a break this holiday season.

For Mary, read Unexpected Hope. 

For a break and maybe some cathartic tears, read A Longest Night Reflection.

A Longest Night Reflection

This the manuscript text of a reflection shared at a longest night service on December 23, 2018. 

After I sprained my ankle, it turned several satisfying shades of blue and purple, some of which has yet to completely fade weeks later. My ankle swelled up like a parade balloon and wouldn’t allow me to put weight on it no matter how much I wanted it to, forcing me to take the past few weeks much more slowly than I wanted to. People noticed the boot and or the crutches and the brace and they leapt to help me, carrying things for me, opening doors, holding doors open for about forty-five seconds longer than they thought they were going to need to as I hobbled my way forward. Friends and acquaintances alike would exclaim, “What have you done to your foot!” upon seeing me arrive with my patented step-sliiiide, step-sliiiide, step-sliiiide. In short, everyone could see that I was hurt and everyone was understanding; helpful, even.

I needed that visibility in order to heal, because deep down, I think that if you can’t see a problem, it’s not a real problem. Unless you’re gushing blood or a bone is sticking through, you need to get back up and play through the pain. Mind over matter. We’ll look at bandaging up whatever’s wrong when we’ve got some time to rest, when there’s not so much to do, but right now, unless it’s an emergency, we’re going to keep on keeping on.

I come from a line of football coaches, in case that wasn’t apparent.

But the truth is, it would have taken longer to heal if I didn’t acknowledge the injury and rest my ankle when I needed to, and if I didn’t accept the help that other people offered me. My black-and-blue foot probably saved me a couple of weeks of lingering pain on the other side of the healing process. If my sprain that hadn’t shown up so vibrantly, I would have ignored the pain and limped on for months.

Grief is like that for many of us, I think. If it’s not visible, it’s hard to heal from, and it’s only visible for such a short period of time. The time between the diagnosis and the funeral, or the time between the phone call and the wake, or the time between the papers being filed and the divorce being finalized, as long as they may seem in those moments, are finite periods of time. It’s not often that you find people who understand that those moments are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to grief. And just when you think that iceberg has melted, it surfaces again, brought up by the warm currents of the holidays or anniversaries or triggered memories. This on-going, invisible grief can be more difficult to deal with than the fresh grief we felt at the moment of loss.

Of course, there are also those kinds of hurts and loss that people never see, or don’t take seriously when they do see them. Struggles with fertility. Miscarriages. Abuse of every kind. Loss of friendships. Loss of relationships. Loss of homes or places of safety and comfort. Loss of jobs or careers or roles or dreams. All of these things cause real pain and real grief that is exacerbated by this time of year.

And we wish someone, anyone, would just understand, without us having to explain. Telling someone else that you’re grieving takes vulnerability and energy and we might not have that in us right now, but it would be so good for someone else to understand that we do want to hear our loved one’s names. We do want to tell stories and think of all the things they loved, or would have grown up to love. We want someone to understand that we need space sometimes and not come chasing us down, or someone to ask if they can join us at the Christmas tree as we sit looking at the lights, and just listen to a little bit of what’s going on. We wish someone would just get it.

But the world is not a wish-granting factory and so we do our best to get by. We share articles on facebook that explain why the holidays aren’t happy for everyone, hoping that they’ll open just one person’s eyes, and go back to our celebrations in whatever mood we can muster up that day. We say the responses that talk about joy we don’t feel. We pray the prayers that talk about hope that we don’t have. We sing the hymns that talk about love when we’re not experiencing. We do our best to smile and laugh around family and friends, to meet the expectations of the season. That’s just the way life has to be lived.

I know that’s the way I’ve lived my life. Most of the darkness in my life has been the invisible kind, the kind that I myself even have trouble taking seriously. Grief over the sudden and unexpected deaths of two of my friends, both of them educators who should have had long lives ahead of them, has hit me in waves over the past year, but it’s not my dinner table that will have an empty seat, it’s the one in their families’ homes. The same with Jean, Lib, and Jearline, matriarchs of my life back home. The empty spaces where they should be in church and around the neighborhood are real, but I was not the one who had to greet everyone who came to their funerals. I mourned right along with four of my friends as they lost their children before they were born, but it’s not my arms that ache to hold a baby lost to miscarriage. I have walked with my friend as she and her husband divorced and she begins to heal, but it’s not my heart that was broken over unmet promises of faithfulness and forgiveness. It’s been death by a thousand cuts this past year, but none of them was big enough to break the surface.

And then there’s the pain that’s only my own. Seminary is a time of tearing apart so that you can rebuild and if you’re doing the work right, you’re not only tearing down your false idols of what you understood God to be, you’re also tearing down some of the mistaken ideas you have about yourself. I had thought I was indominable, inimitable, and inexhaustible, but I’ve spent the past year being knocked down upheaval in my personal life, by past abuse becoming a present emotional reality, by changes in relationships, and by depression and anxiety that has been exacerbated by all these challenges, all of which have caused me to fail to uphold my responsibilities in school and in work. I’ve felt like a complete failure, completely alone, completely hopeless. There have been times that I haven’t wanted to go on, times that I’ve wanted to be done living my life, and yet, even with all that scary, serious loss staring me in the face, it’s hard for me to take it seriously. I found myself in my therapist’s office listening to her explain an activity that would, in the end, be the thing that would help me pull my mind back from the edge it was teetering on, saying, “Oh, but that’s for people with real problems.”

Sometimes our pain is invisible, even to ourselves.

But the wonderful, glorious thing about the Christian faith is that our pain is not invisible to God, even when it is to us or to those around us. We are seen and known and loved by the God who made everything, from gluons to galaxies, from quarks to quasars, from starlings to stars. When we hurt, we never hurt alone. God shouts this truth from every inch of creation, but sometimes our pain and grief, the world’s pain and grief, is louder than that, and so God chose to whisper it, to come to earth as a tiny baby in a far-off land a long time ago. Christmas is the time when we remind ourselves of the lengths God will go to in order to be with us, especially in our pain. We are not alone. Our pain is not invisible or unimportant to God. No matter what it is we’ve loss, it mattered. That’s why it hurts, and will continue to hurt.

And that is why God will continue to be with us, in this season and throughout our lives. Because God knows our hurt and God knows that there’s no simple solution to our pain, so God chose to join us in it. Now, I know that this is a high-flying theological claim and that for many of us, in our pain, we could not care less what God is “doing.” But whenever we’re ready to see it, I promise you that we’ll be able to see the presence of God around us, even in this season.

It’ll be there in the hug that brings unexpected comfort.

It’ll be there in the picture that brings a smile where before there had only been sadness.

It’ll be there in the loud, boisterous moment where for a second, just a second, everything seems whole again.

It’ll be there in the stories we tell about those that we’ve lost. God is always there in our remembering.

All those moments of kindness and goodness were planted into creation and they were given new life right alongside the baby who was laid in the manger. We only need to welcome them, the way we will welcome Jesus on Christmas.

Now, none of this is easy. I know that firsthand. But we’ve already made a first step. We’re here, in this place, with these people, who have all come because their pain, visible and invisible, was too much for this holiday season. We’re not alone. And best of all, God is with us. My prayer for you and for me, in the days ahead, is that we would see our pain and acknowledge it, no matter what it is. Pain is pain and grief is grief and it all deserves our attention and care. You can’t just treat the wounds that bruise. And once we’ve done that, I pray that we would be wrapped up in the kindness and goodness hidden in this world that has been so unkind and cruel to us, and held close in the presence of the God whose coming this season celebrates. Amen? Amen. 

Unexpected Hope

This is the manuscript text for a sermon preached on Sunday, December 23, 2018. The sermon texts were Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-55, and Hebrews 10:5-10. The primary text is the Magnificat, which is the end of the Luke text. 

Since Pastor Sue talked about A Charlie Brown Christmas last week, I figure I can talk a little bit about my favorite Christmas movie this week: A Muppet Christmas Carol. I’m a child of the 90s and when this movie came out in 1992, I was the perfect age for the muppets and the singing and the movie effects that did not age well. I love it for its charm, but as I watched it again this week, I loved it anew for its story. A Muppet Christmas Carol catches the heart of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Michael Caine is my favorite Scrooge. There is nothing like watching him go from a curmudgeon who can’t find a word for even Kermit the Frog to learning to dance with the Ghost of Christmas Present and, finally, watching him walk out into the world after realizing, as Gonzo the narrator tells us, that, “His life had been laid out before him, and it could be changed.” I needed some of that kind of Christmas cheer after the week we’ve had.

Because it has been quite the week, friends, hasn’t it? For those of you who follow the news, there have been some high-profile announcements and resignations and changes in plans and policy and I think that many of us wish there was some way that we could influence what’s happening in Washington, to change it for the better, to get rid of the chaos and to clear the pathway for good governance. And we want some way to do that that’s not the hard work of thinking through policy, talking to our members of congress, voting, and getting other people to care enough to vote too. We want a miracle. We could use one. It feels like we won’t get peace any other way.

If you were going to do that, though, what would you do? If you wanted to change the way the world worked, who would you talk to? Surely it would be someone in power, someone with authority. You would want to get the ear of someone who can make change happen, and convince them to be more loving, to be kinder, to advocate for policies that will help all of us. You’re probably going to want to send an angel or something to someone in a suit and tie with an office downtown.

And of course, that’s what we would expect someone who wanted to influence Rome to do as well. Get someone in the emperor’s court on your side. We all know how fickle world leaders are, how they’re held under the sway of their advisors. If you want to change the Roman Empire, you’re going to want to get in with Caesar. That’s how this world works, whether it’s ancient Rome or modern-day Washington. You have to play the game. We know that’s what’s got to be done.

How silly it is, then, for God to have chosen a teenage girl to change the world. A teenage girl with no connections, no leader’s ear bent to her will. A poor girl from the middle of nowhere, whose best-case-scenario is getting married, having a son, and keeping the household for her husband until he dies and her son is able to take care of her. If Jesus were to come to Earth today in the United States, Mary would be from West Virginia, or a reservation in South Dakota, or a border town in Texas, or Flint, Michigan. We would not notice her, just like no one noticed her then.

Well, no one except for the angel Gabriel, who visits her in the passage just before the one we read for today. Gabriel appears to Mary and says, “Rejoice, highly favored lady! The Lord is with you!”

Highly favored? Lady? Mary? Daily life in Nazareth is a struggle against hunger and unfair taxes. In what way has she been favored? Mary is confused by these words, wonders what sort of greeting this is.

Gabriel responds to this by telling her to not be afraid, which helps, I’m sure. He then tells her that’s she’s going to have a son, and that son is going to be a king of a kingdom without end.

Mary keeps her cool and thinks through her situation. She asks, “How is this going to happen? How am I supposed to have a baby without having sex? I haven’t, you know, known a man, not like that.”

Gabriel is ready with an explanation. “The Holy Spirit will come over you, because the one who is to be born will be holy. Look, even Elizabeth, your cousin, the one who spent her long life thinking that she would never have a child, is six months pregnant. Nothing is impossible for God.”

Nothing is impossible for God. Mary chews this over. She thinks about where she’s from, all the poverty and sickness and death, and thinks about what kind of kingdom her son will bring about. If he’s going to be a holy one, then maybe he’ll actually make a better world. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me as you said.” And it is. And Gabriel goes.

Now, we have no confirmation that this visit from an angel is real, no proof that it wasn’t just the delusion of a teenage girl, until Mary goes to visit Elizabeth. It’s still just the word of a woman, but Elizabeth feels the baby inside her jump when Mary shows up. It is such an insignificant event, two mothers-to-be meeting. My cousins did the same a few years ago when they were both pregnant, one with her third, the other with her first. The most that came out of it was a facebook post.

But Elizabeth knows that there’s something more significant here. Something special, something miraculous has happened to Mary. The baby in her knows it too, and Elizabeth knows the miracle that her own baby is. “Why do I have this honor?” she asks Mary, “that the mother of my Lord should visit me? Happy, blessed is she who believed that the Lord would fulfil all promises!”

Let’s pause here, with these two happy and blessed women speaking to each other, to think again about who Mary is. We have already seen her stand up to an angel, boldly asking this fear-inducing heavenly being questions about how, exactly, God is going to use her in this plan. We can guess that Mary, even though she’s a teenager who’s probably only rarely if ever left her village, has already been through a lifetime of stress and strain, living where she does. These two things tell us that she must have some chutzpah. And Elizabeth has called her “happy” or “blessed.” The Greek work is μακάρια, and that root, μακ, means “to make long or large.” Someone becomes μακάριος when God stretches out and reaches to them God’s grace or favor. Elizabeth is using a word that, in other days, would have meant, “Mary, God has made you great!”

And so what does this bold teenager, full of chutzpah, do with being told that God has blessed her, has made her great? The CEB fails us here, because what Mary says is, “My soul magnifies the Lord!” Magnifies, the Greek word being Μεγαλύνει, literally meaning, “makes great.” My soul makes the Lord great, Mary says, and I rejoice with all that I am.

She goes on to explain what she’s feeling to Elizabeth, and as she does, she sounds a lot like Hannah, who we heard about a month ago. God has seen me, Mary says. God knew where I was, what my life was like, and God favored me! The mighty one has done great things for me and everyone will call me blessed. Me. Not Caesar, or Herod, or even David, the great king of the past. Me. Mary.

God has done mighty things for me and not only for me, but for everyone, from generation to generation, all who know God to be God, God shows mercy to them. And we know God can do it. We have seen how strong God is. We know that the proud, the arrogant, those Romans who are in charge, God can pull them down from their high places and lift up people like you and me, Elizabeth. God has kept all the promises made to our ancestors and he’s done it again. God has done this wonderful thing for me and God will do more. God will fill up the hungry with good things, but the rich, who already have more than they should, God will send them away empty. We know that God’s remembering the mercy God promised to us, the mercy that was promised to us forever.

This is Mary’s prayer. It’s not just the humble prayer of the obedient. It has some bite to it. If God is going to change this world, Mary has a prayer for how it’s going to happen.

If Mary were living in the United States today, out in the country or on a reservation or in a border town or in the inner city, what would her prayer look like? Who would she be thinking of when she says that God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones? Who is she thinking of when she says that God has lifted up the lowly? Take a minute, and write things down if that helps you think, and try to imagine the world that Mary is praying for. 

You see, Mary is laying out our world in front of us, an unexpected world, a world where there are rich and poor, great and lowly, and a world where God chooses the lowly. When God wanted to change the world, God didn’t reach out to Caesar or anyone in his court. God reached out to a teenage girl, from the middle of nowhere, and showered favor on her. The hope of all the nations entrusted to the most unexpected of vessels. And Mary herself tells us what this hope is. It’s the same as Scrooge’s, after his life was laid out in front of him. It is hope that things can change.

On Tuesday, we’ll celebrate the birth of that hope. We’ll celebrate God come to earth, God who put on flesh, God who stepped into the body prepared for him and who lives in the world today, through you and through me. Jesus, born in Bethlehem of Judea, coming from the least, will be the one who changes everything, the one who casts down the proud and lifts up the lowly.

Is that the Christmas that you’ve been preparing your hearts for? In this journey through advent, is this the Christmas you’ve been waiting for? Or is it a little unexpected?

If it is, you’re not alone. But my prayer for us, for all of us, is that we are able to welcome the Christ child into this world on Tuesday, ready and eager for the change he longs to bring, a change that bends the world toward justice and kindness and love and life abundant. Amen. 

Allowed

You are allowed to take a break. You are a human, not a robot, and you require food and sleep and friends and the chance for your imagination to dance. Do not begrudge yourself these things. 

You are allowed to break down. You are a human, not Atlas, or gravity. The Earth will not spin off its course if you stop doing everything you're doing when your body and mind force their priority on you. The roaring river of life will continue its journey to the sea regardless of whether it carries you along with it. It is better to lay gasping on the shore than to drown. 

Please don't drown.

You are allowed to get people to help you. You are allowed to let people help you. You are a human, not some fictive perpetual motion machine. No, listen to me, dearheart. You do not have to do this by yourself. You cannot do this by yourself. You have spent all these years regretting every kindness given to you because each shows anew the lie of your self-sufficiency, but let me tell you, with the abundance of love that I have in my heart, that lie is killing you. Yes, I know that everyone will one day leave. Yes, I know that everyone will at some point let you down. Yes, I know, you have to be responsible for yourself. All of these things are true, but hear me: your life cannot be lived alone. It is too much to bear. It is too much to bear and you are surrounded by others who are willing and able to help you bear it. They are gifts. They are grace. Let them help you. Let them love you. 

You are allowed to love. 

You are allowed to love. 

You are allowed to love. 

It is not some mistaken emotion produced by an unbridled limbic system. It is not an unconcerned and unprincipled appeal to sentimentality. It is not some basic evolutionary or tribal urge that should be understood and transcended. It is none of the things that you worry it is. It is not weakness, it is not distractibility, it is not misplaced longing, it is not a waste. Love is how people care for each other, and we bear a great burden of care for one another. Love is how people watch after one another, and we are called to be each other's keepers. Love is how we carry each other along. Love is how we share with one another. Love is how we survive. No, more than that, more than survival. Love is life abundant. Love is what we are promised, what we are made for. 

Please, dearheart, remember always that you are allowed to love. You are allowed to love and be loved. Every good thing grows out of this. Give yourself permission to love. 

You Are a Liar/I Hope You're Eaten Alive

This is a reflection on two episodes of Conversations With People Who Hate Me that deal with the topic of rape and sexual assault. As Dylan says, if that's not something you should be reading about right now, that's totally fine. Go out and do something good for you. But if you've got the energy, this might help you see something new in the world you haven't seen before. 

---

I want to be strong. I want to be kind. I want to help. Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ on my left, Christ on my right, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me. I want to be good.

Mostly, though, I want to be strong and I kinda want people to know that I'm strong. I want to be capable and I kinda want to hear people tell me that I'm capable. St. Patrick's Breastplate fails me in the face of my stubborn adherence to this picture of who I am, who I want to be. I want to be useful. I want to do something. Not only do I want these things, but I think that my value, my worth depends on my ability to be useful.

And because I'm usually strong and because I'm usually capable and because my value system depends on it, I find myself particularly torn down when I find that I'm not strong enough or not capable enough. It's supremely frightening when I don't really understand why my strength has abandoned me or where my ability has gone.

That's what happened after I listened to episode 17 of Dylan Marron's Conversations With People Who Hate Me, You Are a Liar. Typically in my past, when difficult topics had come up for discussion, like rape and sexual assault, or any of the other million ways that hurt people hurt people, or careless people hurt people, the walls go up and the analytical mind comes on and I sit with the facts of the matter. No need to get emotional with it. No need to play on someone's heartstrings. Just give me the information I need to understand the situation. Thanks.

But that conversation was so... raw for me. I began listening with such hope that the person who had called a rape survivor a liar would, through hearing her story from her in her own words, come to understand the complexity of the matter and retract not only his comment but repent of the damaging ideas that had led to it. But as the episode went on, it became clear that he was entrenched in his way of thinking and that nothing was going to change his mind and I once again remembered why so many survivors of sexual violence and abuse don't report. People don't believe us anyway, don't hear us. And that's not going to change.

Inside me, my strength was telling me, "Oh, get over it. These are three people on the internet having a conversation that is in no way connected to you. The guy didn't mean anything by it. He didn't harbor any ill will. He just had a difference of opinion. Move on. Get over it. Get over it. Get over it. Shut it down. We have other shit to do."

I couldn't.

I laid there for God knows how long, then got up and found something to distract me. I didn't do any of the things that needed doing. I wasn't capable. I wasn't strong. I couldn't get over even this small thing. For the rest of my life, these small things will knock me off my feet and I will take days to recover and everything good about me, everything helpful will be gone. It's hopeless. I am useless. I am worthless.

This, my friends, is not what good is.

It's easier now, with some distance and some life-changes, to be gentle with my past self and with my mind. I had thought that strength was being able to play through the pain and I understand why I thought that. Sometimes strength is that. But strength is also seeing your hurt and allowing yourself time to heal. Strength is seeing that you are worthy of healing, that you are important enough, valuable enough just because you're here, to receive care for your wounds. Strength is allowing other people close enough to help. They probably want to help too. And usefulness and capability are all well and good, but they are not the pillars upon which your value stands. You, just as you are, are loved and capable of loving, and that is more than enough to build upon.

Once upon a time, during a moment of caring for me while I was deep in the throes of intense self-doubt, a friend asked me, "Well, you believe that Jesus loves you, right?" And I could not for the life of me fathom why he would bring up such a trite idea at such an important time. Sure. Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so. I have accepted this and graduated from Sunday School. Can we move on to something more substantial now?

But I think he was actually aiming at something deeply important. My faith tradition gives me an anchor, a storehouse of hope and love that is never closed to me, though I may not think that I deserve to run to it. The truth that I do believe, phrased in a way that I will hear it, is that the Love that made the Cosmos also cares for me, regardless of what I've done or left undone, regardless of what I can do or will do, regardless of the state of my heart. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners and that proves God's love for us. My brain, my mind, my lived experience might cause me to doubt my worth, but keeping the faith, for me, as hard as it is, means remembering that I am loved by an everlasting, inexhaustible Love, and that I am able to give love because part of that Love lives in me. That, for me, is as substantial as it gets. This is the touchstone. This is home.

Now, this is my journey and not yours. I will be the first to admit that the faith tradition that anchors me is also the one that deeply scarred me, making me think that I was worth less because of my abuse. I have had to wrestle with Christianity and the Church and who I understand Christ to be in order to land in a place of sureness in my faith, and that is not the journey for everyone. Another belief system or another way of seeing the world might speak to you. You might anchor your hope in the good that we can do for each other, and find that goodness and hope and love in your friendships and other relationships, and that might provide the renewal you need to face the world. But let me leave you with two little sparks of hope anyway:

After years of thinking that I wasn't taken seriously or wasn't cared for when I reported, I found out that the truth of the matter is that I wasn't understood. Finding this out didn't heal every wound, but it did open the door for more love and more understanding in my life than I'd had before. Sometimes life surprises you.

And that guy, who wouldn't believe a rape survivor without empirical evidence? Well, Dylan had another conversation with him and I think you'll find encouragement from listening to this one. If you've got the energy, give episode 25, I Hope You're Eaten Alive, a listen. Sometimes people surprise you, if you're able to give them the chance.

Brought Together

The texts for this sermon were Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-16, and Hebrews 1:1-4 and 2:5-12. They are not easy texts. For good and gracious contextualizing thoughts on the gospel, which talks about divorce, I would direct you to this reflection on the gospel text, which directed much of my thinking for this sermon. The sermon as preached was framed differently in the beginning, with an emphasis on communion, which comes back around at the end, but by and large, this is the sermon text. 

I want to tell the people that we were made with an unquenchable desire for something other than ourselves lodged deep down in our guts. I want to tell the people that the longing that they feel is real and powerful and motivating. I want to tell them that it is right, and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to reach out to another. In times of sorrow and in times of celebration, in times of loneliness and in times of togetherness, in times of comfortable stasis and in times of life-altering fracture, we find our way to one another, and this is as it should be.

The ancient Israelites understood this truth and believed in it so much that they wrote it into their story of creation. The Lord God sees that it was not good for the first human to be alone, the scriptures tell us, and so God seek to create a companion, an aide, for the human. God creates and creates. God makes every living creature and the human names each (what a powerful thing, naming!) and still, at the end, no aide was found for the human.

And then,

After hiding the human in the depth of sleep,

The Lord God gently takes a piece of the human and shapes it into another.

The entirety of creation has passed by at this point. The sky, the seas, the ground, the depths of the earth, the stars, the plants, everything that lives on the earth or in the ocean or soars through the sky, all of the majesty and the marvel, and it is this other, this singular other and none other, that brings the human to song upon waking. This, finally, is the creation, the help, that meets the depth of the human’s longing. This is bone of bone and flesh of flesh. And the human names her Woman and names himself Man and knows that to this one he will cling.

Our lives bear out of the enduring truth of this story. We have all met others in our lives that we have clung to. Good friends. Good family members. Mentors. Partners. The expansiveness of the human’s hymn is so often forgotten. This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This, finally, God, finally, is one who feels so close to me that they must have a piece of me hidden inside of them, in their very being, deep down in their bones. My eyes can see the great goodness of Creation inside this one and it makes me sing. To this one I will hold. With this one I will stay.

We all long for these others in our lives, throughout our lives.

But.

We do not live in an idyllic garden, surrounded by every good thing to eat, at peace with each other and Creation around us. We live here. We live here, in this world, with people who will disappoint us and hurt us and leave us. We live in this world where it is so easy to miss the humanity of someone else, to, in our blindness, miss a piece of ourselves inside of another. We see glimmers of the good world we were made for, the good relationships we were shaped to hope for, but we are all the same surrounded by pain, and in our pain, we hurt others. We may not want to. We may not understand why or how we do it. But to be human in this world is to struggle with the pain given to us and the pain we give away.

Jesus understood this. Jesus, the Word Made Flesh who lived among us, the Word present at creation who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us still, Jesus understood that humans struggle with pain. So when someone asked him, “Is it legal for a man to leave a woman destitute, without any way to live, shamed, ostracized, unable to find a home? Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”, Jesus told them, “No.” Jesus said, “I understand how you have permitted yourselves to live, why you have given yourselves permission to cause lifelong pain to another, but you must understand: From the beginning, God called you to one another. God entrusted you to each other’s care. God joined you together, flesh of each other’s flesh and bone of each other’s bone, and you must not separate yourselves in this way. You must understand this. When you are joined, you have a burden of care for each other, and you must abide by this, and be worthy of it. To do otherwise is betrayal. To do otherwise is pain.” When I read this story from Mark, which contains such harsh words and such harsh teaching, I hear Jesus pleading with us, feeling our pain, understanding our desire for freedom from it, and begging us, “Be careful with one another. Care for one another. Please understand that you belong to one another.”

And as if he knew that we would miss this, that we would get distracted by all the complexity that marriage entails and misunderstand our burden of care for each other, the writer of Mark’s gospel tells us another story of togetherness. You see, people had been bringing little children to Jesus, but the disciples wanted to keep them away. They spoke sternly to them.

Jesus, upon seeing this, is indignant. Not only have they misunderstood that they must care for one another, but they have misunderstood again that there are some that we must extend particular care for. It was not only the women of this time who were vulnerable to this painful world, it was also the children. (And I think, in our heart of hearts, we understand that not much has changed in the millennia since Christ walked this Earth.) Jesus, heartbroken and full of love for these little ones who had come to see him and had been turned away, speaks to his disciples and he says, “Do not do this thing. Do not stop them. Let the little children come to me. Don’t you see? The World to Come, in all its goodness and togetherness, belongs to them. You have so much to learn from these ones, from their love and tenderness, their curiosity and their wonder.”

And Jesus lifts the children up in his arms, as he will lift up all of us in his outstretched arms on Golgotha, and Jesus blesses them. These ones who had been told that they had no place beside Jesus are the ones who are particularly blessed by him. When the God of the Universe came to this world in flesh and bone, he reached out to the ones who could give him nothing but love and answered their love with blessing. And even as he held them, he spoke to those who would have stood in the way of that blessing. “These belong to me, just as you belong to each other. Do not stop this.”

The writer of Hebrews gives us an argument for understanding Jesus’ actions here in the Gospel of Mark. In beautiful language, the writer reminds us that God has always been speaking to us, speaking to the ancestors in the past in many various ways, but that God has spoken anew in Jesus. God has spoken anew not by a prophet or by an angel, but by a Son, who is truly God as the Father and the Spirit are. He cares for us (and what are we that God cares for us, is mindful of us?), and he carries us along throughout our lives. Though he has returned to glory, for a while he lived here on this earth, moving through the world in flesh and bone just like us, and died, just as we will all die, and in this death brought us all to glory.

It is in the final verses of our reading from Hebrews that the author ties all of this together, our whole story from the man and the woman in the garden, to Jesus and the women and the children, to today. The author writes, “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,

‘I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters,
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.’”

Jesus has been here on this Earth. He knows our pain as deeply as we know it, and how we struggle with it, and how we suffer, because he suffered it too. And still, despite all that pain, God calls us God’s children, ones to be brought to glory. Despite everything, Jesus, who has brought us along with him, is not ashamed to call us his sisters and brothers. Before the world, he claims us as his.

And in calling us brothers and sisters, he gives us back to each other. He calls us again to care for each other.

For we are our brothers’ keepers. We are our sisters’ keepers. We are each others’ keepers. Flesh of flesh and bone of bone, we belong to each other and we are called to care for one another.

And so, we gather around this table for this meal, siblings together claimed by the Most High God, to remember what God in Christ has done for us. God has called us to each other from the very beginning, all humans everywhere together, and God has called us back to God, coming down from Majesty to suffer and die for us, that we might return back to majesty in love and thanksgiving. We gather this morning with Christians around the world, other daughters and sons of God, brothers and sisters together with Christ, to bring the pain that the world has given us and leave it on the cross, to be reconciled to each other, and to be given strength to care for each other as brothers and sisters ought. Best of all, God meets us here. Christ joins us when we share this meal that remembers him and in his presence we find love and joy, peace and comfort, strength for today and hope for tomorrow. In communion, Jesus gathers all of us once again up into his arms, blesses us, and gives us back to each other.

And what God has joined, let no one tear asunder.

Amen. 

Opening the Box

Content warning: This post is a reflection on my experience being triggered by the nation-wide conversation around sexual abuse and assault, which took off with the #MeToo movement and has come back into attention as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford prepares to testify against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. While I don't directly reference anything that would trigger me as a survivor, if you know that this is not content you should be reading right now, close this window and go take care of yourself. 

In some ways, this is a reflection inspired by this article on Slate. It does offer a little bit more hope than I'm able to right now. Still, at the end of the day, I long to live in a world where sexual misconduct is universally condemned and where survivors don't have to relive some of the most difficult times in their lives in order to make a change. If you have the energy to read it, that's what the post below is trying to express. 

---

Listen, I had put my demons in a box. Sure, they had carried with them safety and intimacy and a whole host of emotions, but at least they were gone. I had locked all of this away as a matter of survival and on the whole, I wasn't all that upset with my life. I had good friends, I had aspirations, I had opportunities for travel. My world was sufficient.

And then I went to a training on preventing child abuse, both physical and sexual, and I couldn't understand why all I could do was stare at the table as the statistics were read and the presenter tried hard to get the people in the room to understand how widespread the problem was and how urgent the need to address it. My hands clenched into fists under the table, grasping tight to the lid of my demons' box, but by the end of the training, I had resources and I had plans for action and I grasped those as tight as I could. By the end of the year, I would be pushing for an update on my church's Safe Sanctuary policy and running a short training on the policy and on recognizing abuse. The demons might have rattled the box, but I took courage from it. I chose to confront as much of my past as I was able to at the time and it galvanized me. I made a difference.

From time to time over the next few years, the box would shake, but never burst. There would be tremors, but the world would always right itself again after. Sometimes, I'd walk over to the box, because I knew that I had locked away good, important things in there too, things that I needed, but anytime the chance came to open it, I ran away. I'm very good at running away.

Up until the day that I wasn't. That day, I felt secure in myself and buoyed by the possibility of new and good and exciting things, and I walked up to the box and opened it up, standing still and strong in the face of what might come. My demons, hungry for fresh air, rushed out and away and I could gather the good things from my box and close it back up, empty. For a time, I waited for my demons to come home, but days and weeks passed and it seemed like maybe I was free.

And then #MeToo happened. Then everything was story after story after story of abuse and assault, affirmation upon affirmation that women should be believed, that all survivors regardless of gender should be believed, article after article of the horrors of surviving, reporting, being disbelieved, being retraumatized, putting yourself back together and getting torn apart again and again. The conversation around sexual abuse and assault was everywhere and it was important and I felt that I had to participate, so I did. And as I did, my demons came home to roost.

Now, I'm strong. I know this. I know that I am loved and that I am valuable and that I did not cause my demons. I know that I am worthy of feeling powerful emotions, of safety, of intimacy. I know that I can't box all this back up again. But the demons go after these strengths. The demons use old lies and speak them again in new ways. The demons take the breath out of my lungs and the thoughts out of my head and leave me trapped in this vacuum chamber with no light, no sound, no life. They're only in my head but somehow they paralyze me. They are ancient and have worked against stronger people than me. To fight them seems impossible. Better to let them do what they're going to do and hope there's something of me left when the air comes back. So far, there has been.

But I don't have time to be fighting demons. I have so much else that I need to do. I want to hear the stories of survivors who explain #WhyIDidntReport, want to sit with them in their grief and pain, the pain that I know so well, but I can't. I want to pay attention to Dr. Ford's testimony on Thursday, but I can't. I want to share posts that say that I stand with survivors, but I can't. Every time I turn my attention to this conversation, my demons pound at my door, at the barriers I've put up, and they tear at me until I can't stand being in my own head anymore. Demons are fed by this world we're living in right now. They are strong and they do not keep to the shadows. And I do not have much hope that that will change anytime soon.

God, how long will we have to do this? How long will people take another's body and use it the way they want, whenever they want, without consequence? How long will this fight continue? How long will I have to stand against the guilt and shame and fear that should never have been mine? God, why do you let us live like this? God, why do you let this hurt me?

Jesus, Lord, we need a change.

Glass

It is difficult for me to resist the temptation of fragmentation, for me to acknowledge the value of wholeness when wholeness is such a struggle in these times of ours. It is much easier to accept the fragmentation pushed upon me rather than to seek the wholeness I know I should want, easier to set my emotions in a box for later, when I can actually deal with them, or ignore that pain in my back until I finish the assignment, or sit and stare at my newsfeed until the tidal wave of ignored feelings and pains dulls and I can use my mind again. Mine is a functional fragmentation, a resignation to the idea that I cannot carry the entirety of me throughout my day, that I do not have the currency, the value, or the energy needed to be whole.

I heard a sermon recently where the preacher shared a story with a distinct image. The preacher had had a dream while writing the sermon, and in it, he had a mouth full of shards of glass. He asked us to imagine that, imagine what a mouthful of broken glass would feel like, and that was a powerful moment for me. You cannot help but be aware that your mouth is filled with glass. Every breath cuts. You can't speak, you can't smile, can't laugh, can't scream. You feel like you will suffocate taking these short, shallow breaths through your nose, like your jaw will freeze in the slightly open position you have adopted to accommodate the glass. You keep your teeth together and your lips closed because if these shards of glass fall out, they will shatter even more, spattering blood from your mouth onto the floor, and no one will be able to approach you to tend your wounds for fear of being harmed themselves. You know that what is inside of you is dangerous, and as the panic sets in, you wonder how long you can keep the danger from escaping.

Now, the preacher himself was not as captivated by the image as I was, instead moving on to connect the image of a mouth full of broken glass to the one found in Ezekiel 3, where the prophet gets a mouthful of scroll and it tastes like honey, and to make an important point about the necessity of good preaching. But if Ezekiel's scroll, Ezekiel's words from God, taste like honey, then this image that we're working with, this broken glass, surely means that there are words from God that are sharp, and cutting, and difficult to speak. They are words that were never meant to stay inside of us, but will require some pain and some loss to speak. We will need to be careful with them. We will need help. But we cannot keep these words inside of ourselves. They will kill us.

I would give anything in the world for this glass to pour out of my mouth, to fall on the ground in a million colors and settle into a pattern of stained glass beauty, all sensible and lovely and prophetic. I would love to let go of these little fragments of pain that absorb my attention, that stop me from caring for myself, that stop me from caring for others. We all have mouths full of glass sometimes, I think, times when we ourselves have shattered and fragmented and the things that cause us pain must be spoken, and when we speak them, if we speak them carefully, and purposefully, these things become holy words. They become words of prophecy, words from God, summoning the four winds and bringing life into places that had been dead. These shards that we carry, afraid to let them fall, can, in time, scatter goodness into the world.

But it is not easy. It is not without cost. It is not without struggle.

It is difficult for me to resist the temptation of fragmentation, difficult to stand against the lie that I cannot be whole, should not try to be whole, and so I stand with my teeth together and my lips closed and breathe these short shallow breaths through my nose that will in time suffocate me and I forget that I was not made to be this way. But let me now speak that truth into existence. Let me breathe life into the things I have forgotten. I was not made to be shattered. None of us were.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Open up.

---

It would be irresponsible of me to place an invitation like that at the end of a piece and not have any resources available to those who might be struggling with what's going on inside of them. If you are not in a place to be reading or thinking about suicide or self-harm, it's okay to stop reading now. There are resources below for those who want to scroll on.











First and foremost, for those who are wrestling with suicidal thoughts, you are loved and there is help. If you don't feel that you can reach out to a friend or family member, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.

If that's not your situation, you can still get help from a counselor, therapist, or other mental health professional. I think everyone can benefit from therapy. You can start by looking for a therapist here and if you need any help at all on that journey (which isn't always an easy one), please reach out to me. Some mental health professionals have sliding scales and flexible meeting options if that's something that you need. I can recommend the Calm Harm app that might help those who struggle with self-harm or thoughts of self-harm as an aid to mental health treatment, but not a replacement.

We all carry difficult things around inside of us, but the beauty of the gospel is that we are loved by the deep Love that made the cosmos and we do not have to stay as we are when we are broken and hurting. That Love lives in each of us, and brings us to care for each other. If you need help, reach out. If you don't need help but you know someone who does, reach out to them with gentleness and without judgement. I'm on firmer ground than I've been in a while and it's because of the love and support that has been shown to me by so many people in my life as I've started therapy and have, in fits and starts, begun to take better care of this body I live in. If anyone reading this needs any kind of help, let me know.

Pictures

One of my best friends is getting married today.

I have so many feelings.

It's not exactly like when my best friend from growing up got married and my other best friend from middle school and I got to the wedding a little bit late, having to sit on the groom's side of the packed church as she walked down the aisle to a hymn that made me think to myself, "This is why we're friends," and also, "I'm glad I'm not getting married anytime soon because I'm 100% copying all of the music for this ceremony." That day was full of joy and laughter and reunions with high school friends and the absolute ideal reception. I was so happy for Sarah and Robs and in love with their story and I involuntarily smile now seeing pictures of their kids and their life.

And it's nothing at all like when my older brother got married. I was and continue to be so happy for Stephen and Lindsey, but I was involved in that wedding (and its many pictures) and being so close to what is, best case scenario, a pivotal moment in two people's lives made me reflective. I made this video about how marriage is, in a way, our shout into the void, and I, remarkably, stand by most of that more than a year later. I did a lot of my formative thinking about what a life-long partnership could and should look like in the past couple of years, and I still think of it as this beautiful thing, this lovely attempt to go forward into this world that will disappoint us, holding someone else's hand, struggling against the current that pulls all of us back. Thoughtful, caring, dedicated marriages have legs. If you do this right, you can walk for miles and miles.

Today, as Pamela and Brock celebrate the ceremony that solemnizes their promises to each other in front of those who are important to them, I find myself trying and failing to work on schoolwork at Pamela's house, this little home of hers that I adore that will, in short order, belong to someone else as she makes a new home with Brock. I'm so excited for her, so excited that she found someone who smiles at her the way everyone wants to be smiled at, who jokes and laughs with her, who holds her when she needs it and who is willing to be held, who brings his family and his world together with hers in a delightful bouquet of people and stories and love. Pamela was there with me when I first decided that opening up to people was a good thing to do, and she has been there with me since, going on adventure after adventure, climbing mountain after valley after mountain. She has been there with me as both of us have figured out what love between two people could look like. I could not be more happy that she has found someone who can be the love of her life.

See, Pamela values people. This is her fridge:

It is covered with photos of friends and family. It holds memories of travels and adventures and important life moments. In her kitchen, in this central place where many of us just move through our days mindlessly feeding what needs to be fed, she wallpapers her space with the people who are important to her. She actually prints out physical photos of people and moments near and far. In this world of distance and remove, Pamela re-embodies us.

It's not just her fridge. She's a fan of collages as well, one of which features this delightful picture of me in Iceland:

I love that Pam chose this to go in the collage. I believe we were hunting waterfalls on this day, trusting the GPS in our car to navigate us from one place to another. In this picture, I am a few days past having left Edinburgh, a week away from moving to my new place in DC, and my hair is a fluffy nightmare. But we had been singing and that whole day had been this glorious exploration of beauty and wonder and dampness. I love that jacket, love the way we're smiling. Even though I cringed the first time I saw it on the wall, there are so many gorgeous aspects of this moment. I'm glad it's immortalized here.

So, to the woman who tends to find beauty in the times where even I fail to see it, and to the man who has made her so happy over the past two years, I wish you the very best. I pray that the days ahead, be they easy or hard, will be filled with joy, patience, hope, faithfulness, and love. I pray that you will always be able to see in each other the wonderful, worthy, glorious, valuable person that you see in each other today, and that as the years stretch out in front of you and redefine what family means to you, you will find the strength within yourselves and each other to persevere in this world that is so temporary, so finite. Make an infinity, my friends. I'm forever thankful that I'll be here to see you do it.

Weather

"How's the weather?"
"Rain."
"Oh."
"Light rain, which is not too bad. Coupla showers."

I'm listening to this conversation as I'm supposed to be studying or reading or something in the library and it exhausts me. Not that I wasn't already exhausted. Not that I haven't been exhausted. But it exhausts me anew. My exhaustion is perennial and it isn't helped by light rain.

God, what I wouldn't give for a thunderstorm.

Not one of these pathetic thunderstorms that we've been having, which are mostly heat lighting and booms and drizzle, but a real deluge, one that lasts all night and rattles the windows. Or better yet, give me rain for days. Soak me in it. Leech all that humidity out of the air and condense it into droplets and let it fall fall fall fall fall until the sky is cried out. It has been so hot lately. So stagnant. You feel like you're swimming when you walk outside. The air is needy and clingy. It's hard to breathe, hard to walk, hard to exist. A coupla showers are not going to fix this. I need the heavens to open up.

But how can I ask for a deluge? At worst, it would cause flooding and at best, traffic delays. Not that I think this is a prayer that would be answered, either, because I don't think the weather or God work like that, but I feel selfish anyway, wanting, needing something that would cause problems for someone else. Best to just deal with the humidity. Shave my legs, wear dresses, make my body presentable for the heat. Carry extra water to replace the gallons that must be escaping through my skin. Make smiley faces in the condensation on windows because if you can't joke about your discomfort, you're not mourning properly.

But all of that requires energy. Energy that I don't have. Energy that I can't find through all this water in the air that refuses to fall. God, if you would just give me one good storm, to clear the air, to electrify me, I promise that I'd be better. I wouldn't just spend the day staring at the drops as they feed into the puddles, I swear. I'd go out and dance in it, splash around, be delighted. Pinky-swear, I would. Just give me the chance. Give me a thunderstorm and I promise I'll be better. God, don't you want me to be better?

In one version of the story, I bet Jonah prayed for the whale.

Those Who Mourn

This week on the blog, I'd like to bring you the sermon I preached on July 15 as a part of a sermon series on the Beatitudes, the opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew 5-7. This sermon is the second in the series, based around the verse, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." The other scriptures for the morning were from Genesis 16, Psalm 42, and Revelation 21. 

I love the Beatitudes, and I especially love them given the role they play in Jesus' teaching. The Sermon on the Mount is presented in Matthew like Jesus just sat down and spoke it, but it’s more likely that the author of the gospel of Matthew was collecting together common teachings of Jesus, things he always used to say. Jesus was always saying things like, 

“Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Blessed are those who mourn.

You are the salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden.”

I think it’s especially important that these were things that Jesus was always saying given that our beatitude for this morning is, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” and I think remembering what people always used to say is a way that we comfort ourselves and mourn all at the same time. My friend Jessica, who died earlier this year, she was always saying, “It’s never too late to follow your dreams.” She had left a career and gone back to school to major in voice because she her dream was to be an opera singer. I believe she would have done it too, if she had been given more time. 

So as we focus ourselves for the sermon, I want you to think of something that someone who is no longer with us was always saying, some story that you tell to your friends or your children or your grandchildren. Hold that memory of who that person was in your mind and your heart for just a moment.

And would you pray with me?

God, you have told us that we are blessed. Help us see that. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Now, what I usually like to do in a sermon is give some historical context, look at where the passage we’re focused on is in respect to the verses before and after it, maybe throw some Greek in there, all so that we have a better understanding of this book that is sacred to us.

I don’t feel the need to do that with the beatitude for today. I don't feel the need to do that because grief is a universal human experience. We come into this world crying and our pain only gets deeper from there. I know many people in this room have experience deep grief in their lives, and so have deep experience with both mourning and comfort. There are many places in the Bible where Jesus's lived experience differs from ours. Grief is not one of them.

We know that Jesus mourns. We see him mourning over Jerusalem. We see him try to take time for himself after the death of John the Baptist. We see him crying at the death of his friend Lazarus.

In fact, the Bible itself is no stranger to mourning. It is full of stories of people who are mourning and who are seen by God. Take this psalm for this morning for example, or the story of Hagar, Sarai's handmaiden, her slave. Hagar is so moved that God comes to her in her time of deep pain and grief that changes what she calls God. She calls God the one who sees me. The Bible tells us that God sees grief.

And that is what this beatitude is telling us as well. Jesus sees the mourning that is happening all around him, that still happens today. He sees the pain. And he turns to those in pain and he says, you are blessed. I see you. I have not forgotten about you. You are blessed.

It is a miraculous thing that Jesus says here, because we do not think that those who mourn are blessed. I would offer up to you the fact that the world around us thinks that those who mourn are weak. We see this in the amount of time we allow people to mourn, the time they are allowed to take away from work in order to mourn, and the services that are available to those who have suffered a great loss. It is insufficient. And so many of us walk around wounded, limping for so long that it becomes part of our gait. We tell ourselves that we have to be OK, we tell others that we're fine, we allow everyone to tell us how strong we are, and all the while there is an ache inside us that is never really going to go away.

Because we think that those who mourn are weak, we walk around unhealed, uncomforted. We see that this is true when we look at those who suffered a loss early in life. Those who had a traumatic event in childhood, such as abuse, an illness, or losing or being separated from a parent or parents, bear the marks of that trauma for the rest of their lives. The brain struggles to develop, the immune system flounders, and the body fails to become all that it could be, all because the body is trying to handle the stress that the child has encountered.

We see similar effects in adults too. The stress associated with grief can literally break your heart, causing a condition that makes it more difficult for your heart to function. Stress, when left untreated and unchecked, can cause your body to become less able to heal itself. As we hold in our pain, our muscles react, tensing up and knotting themselves together until it can become difficult to move. Pain and loss put a weight on us that can be too much to bear, and we so often go about our days as if we have already set it down.

But that is not what Jesus tells us to do here. Jesus tells us to mourn, because those who mourn are blessed. If Jesus sees our pain, we should too. Why should we mourn? Because those who mourn will be comforted.

I think many of us have experienced that comfort after a loss, when our family and friends and community and church come together and wrap us up in support. We get this beatitude intuitively because we know that when grief visits our doorstep and we cry out to those around us, we will be comforted. This is a great and good thing that we as members of the body of Christ try to do for each other, and it is a great and good grace when it happens in the world.

But what about when we mourn and are not comforted? What about the people around the world who mourn the loss of their loved ones because of war or famine or poverty? What about the people who mourn the loss of the lives they once had before disaster rolled into town? What about those who have suffered a tragedy that left a wound no amount of comfort could heal? How long are we to wait for comfort? How long does anyone have to live with this blessed mourning?

Thankfully, not forever. We might be blessed when we mourn now, but we have been promised that in whatever world comes after this one, there will be no more mourning. There will be no more pain. All things will be made new and every tear will be wiped away by the God who loved us too much to stay apart from us. This is the picture painted by the end of Revelation, when there is a new heaven and a new earth. I'm not one to spend time lingering on eschatological fantasies, but I think one of the most beautiful promises in the Bible is that the tears of grief that are beyond comfort in this world will be wiped away in the next. Jesus has promised us that. He has blessed us with it.

So, what do we take away from our beatitude for this week? Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted? Well, I think the first thing we have to remember is that we are blessed when we mourn. Life brings pain to each of us and we need to allow ourselves to feel it, to mourn all our loses whenever they come, to be open to mourning whenever it comes to us again. Blessed are those who mourn does not apply to only those living in the space between death and burial.

The second takeaway is those who mourn will be comforted, but that comfort may not come in the ways we expect. It may be the comfort of our loved ones or our community surrounding us. It may be the comfort of our faith, as the psalmist writes. It may be comfort that comes to us straight from God in this life, as Hagar experienced. Or it may be the comfort that can only be given when deep no longer has to call to deep but when we are reunited with the great Love of the universe which made us and longs to hold us, to wipe away each unconsoled tear from our eyes, and to offer us the comfort that will last for all eternity. Blessed are those who mourn, our Lord tells us, because they will be comforted. Amen. 

Using My Voice

At orientation for seminary, they had us go around the room and say our names, however much of our faith background we were comfortable sharing, and one thing we're sure we'll never do, like skydiving or holding a tarantula. I said that I would never be able to take a vow of silence. I don't do well without my voice.

And I've been having trouble finding it lately. See, every time I go to write, I end up distracted. Here, it looks something like this:

I want to describe for you the wonderful feeling of community that I had while singing the two encores at the homecoming concert, how for those ten minutes, I remembered what it was like to feel wrapped up in love, whole and holy, safe and they lost 1,500 migrant children last year.

The kid I nanny thinks my name is Go-go. He's trying to say Jo-jo, which is not my favorite of nicknames, but he's not great at the J sound yet and so Go-go it is. I marvel every time I smile at it, unaware that my heart could melt like this when they're taking babies from their mothers.

You know, I'm not sure that I really understood what the word "triggered" meant until I was watching Obama's immigration policy didn't welcome the stranger either but it's so much worse now. 

There are glorious summer days, you know. They're sandwiched in between the days of oppressive humidity and heat and some of these are asylum seekers. It's an international human right.

As I watched the blue dye wash out of my hair, I thought they have no plan for reuniting these families.

I woke up this morning and THEY ARE KEEPING CHILDREN IN CAGES.

I— these CHILDREN will be damaged for life. This is terrorism.

Now, listen, I know I need to be taking care of myself and starting today, I'm going to be doing just that, but the reason that we take care of ourselves is so we can be loud in times like these. Don't forget about these children just because it's not in the news this week. Don't imagine that the policy is better just because a toothless executive order was signed. Don't get distracted by whatever new scandal is popping up. 

I don't know how to solve all of our problems but I do know that ICE under this zero tolerance policy is functioning as a terrorist organization and we already have other immigration security in place. I do know that you should call your representative and your senators and tell them to defund and abolish ICE. Do it daily. This policy does not make us safer, kinder, or better. This is not the United States of America we want to be. Use your voice.